iPhone 14 Pro Max, 24 mm, ISO 80, 3.0s@f1.78

App: Spectre

Last weekend we were headed to the South Coast to attend a Christmas party being thrown by wife’s most favourite band in the world, Archive. I wasn’t feeling particularly good so was sat in the passenger seat whilst the wife acted as chauffeur. As I was sat there feeling a bit meh and watching the world go by as we were travelling along the M4 it struck me how incredibly grey and dull everything outside seemed. I’ve used the Spectre app for quite a while and in the right scenarios I think it produces some great results. I pressed the phone’s lens up against the window and selected a three second exposure in the app. I then cropped from portrait to square and that’s it. A vague greenness is visible at the bottom but otherwise this looks like a monochrome image. Sadly it’s not – the world really was that grey. well just outside Reading on the M4 it was, anyway…

Canon 5D 26 mm, ISO 200, 5 sec @ f/16

This is a photo from the archives, taken way back in May 2008 whilst I was working in Dublin. According to the EXIF data this was taken at around 23:00 and I remember the thinking the reflection of the lights in the River Liffey may have made nice image.

Unfortunately I was wrong and this sat until very recently unloved and untouched in my Lightroom catalog. The lighting was vey warm and I just didn’t like the way it looked as it distracted from the architecture.

I decided to try converting to monochrome using the ever reliable Lenswork Warm Tone, then dodged and burned in a couple of locations. Finally, a tight crop to accentuate the width of the building and the job’s a good ‘un!

Canon M6 25 mm, ISO 100, 5 sec @ f/16

A recently built roundabout near me has red street lighting installed, apparently for the benefit of bats. I thought this would make a decent photo when the conditions were right and today was the day! Heavy fog throughout the day persisted into the evening and I decided to try my luck. I was pleased to see a red glow in the distance as I made my way there and the challenge then became three-fold:

• First, to find a position where the effect of the fog was pronounced enough,
• Next to determine the distance at which other details and colours were neither too prominent nor missing; I think the blue sign in the middle of the image tells us that this is not simply a monochrome conversion.
• Finally, the exposure time determined the level of blooming on the lights and I found 5 seconds to be the optimal time.

In terms of post processing, the image is simply cropped and the contrast increased slightly.

I have called this ‘Close Encounters’ as the arrangement of the light and the their direction reminds me of the spaceship in Steven Spielberg‘s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Canon 5D, 25 mm, ISO 200, 150 sec @ f/11

Well it’s been a long time since my last post and it’s been for a number of reasons that I won’t bore myself let alone anyone else with! This is a morning shot of New Brighton Lighthouse – taken at around mid-morning so the sun was already pretty high and falling directly onto the lighthouse.

I had been thinking about the purpose of the lighthouse and how mariners would view it as a welcome sight, being guided and reassured by its calming presence. Of course there are no rocks to be dashed up at the mouth of the Mersey but there are shallows and sandbars all the same. To help enhance the feeling of calmness I chose a long exposure to smooth the clouds and water, and applied the good old Lenswork Warm Tone preset in Lightroom. I pushed the shadows slightly to reduce contrast and added a gentle vignette. Whilst the lighthouse is the main subject, I really like the presence of the huge cranes in the background; their brooding presence highlighting the solitary nature of the lighthouse…

I tried a new crop ratio with this image too and I have to say I like it.

Canon M6, 70 mm, ISO 100, 1/160 s @ f/2.8

Recently I was lucky enough to have a 1:1 session with an extremely talented photographer friend of mine, Paul Mitchell FRPS. Paul has been running his excellent Woodland Photography workshops for a few years now and needless to say they are well worth attending if you fancy picking up some tips and tricks from a real Pro.

I chose Savernake Forest as the location and met Paul nice an early on a damp grey November morning. “Perfect conditions!”, said Paul cheerily as we trudged off into the gloomy, muddy undergrowth…

Sure enough the soft light really helped to the extent it was really annoying during those short moments when the sun came out and played havoc with the exposure. One of the things I came away from the day with was the need to get into the moment. To just wait and look. Get into the zone before trying to take any photos. It was a lesson I had to keep reminding myself throughout the day.

I was surprised that for the majority of my shots I used my 70-200 mm zoom and no polariser at all. What witchcraft are these landscapes without wide-angle and a polariser? I did struggle somewhat due to the croppsed sensor but it was nice using my zoom lens as I don’t use it that often due to its weight and size. I even got to christen my new Manfrotto X-PRO tripod head, which coped admirably until Paul suggested I simply loosen the collar on the lens to rotate the camera. D’oh!

One of my objectives for the day was to learn some fieldcraft and I feel like I did. Like passing a driving test I now feel I have enough of a skillset to go out and try to truly learn.I just need to find some nearby woods to visit… Cheers Paul for a great day.

Canon M6, 22 mm. ISO 800 & 1600, various speeds @ f/8

For the first time in a long while I revisited some of my old photos today. A couple of months back I had bought a new computer and spent time trawling through some old disks and clearing them down, adding loads of stuff to Lightroom and moving everything onto a nice speedy SSD… Anyway I came across some pictures I had taken back in 2017 on a trip to Italy. I have published some of these previously as Patterns of Pompeii. This time though I found some interior shots. Most of them are too dark or shaky given you can’t use a tripod there and I don’t think I’ve ever bothered looking at them. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of them scrub up quite well!

I think this is down to firstly to the subjects – they’re old – very old, and therefore have imperfections. Second, the material – it’s stone, so not super smooth with razor sharp edges or exact details – perfect for images with some noise… Finally the location was inside and heavily shaded from the sun, i.e. the light was benerally flat with no areas of high contrast.

The left image is of an amazingly well preserved and colourful Dionysiac frieze in the Villa dei Misteri. I decided to remove the colour using an amazing Palladium Print Lightroom preset from LensWork to try and produce an old book drawing type effect. Whether it does that I don’t know but I like the result and actually prefer it to the gaudy coloured version. I also corrected a converging vertical with Photoshop to straighten the vertical lines in the painting. Tying in with the earlier Patterns of Pompeii, the upper right hand corner of this image shows an example of the underlying brickwork featured in that previous post.

The middle image is from Casa dei Vettii and shows I believe, the fight between Eros and Pan,  I have left this as colour as the hues are quite subtle yet varied which really helps define the picture. In monochrome, the image feels rather flat and the detail indiscernible unless the contrast is pushed up, which I think ruins the overall delicacy of the image.

The final image is a bit of a mystery to me as to exactly which building this was in! This was taken on our second visit early in the evening (highly recommended in order to avoid the crowds). Other than being lightened in Lightroom before being subjected to the Palladium Prining preset, the image has had nothing done to it and I think the noise from ISO 1600 really suits it well.

Canon M6, 23 mm, ISO 200, 71 sec @ f/11

Having read about Kynance Cove and that it got incredibly busy during the day, I wanted to make sure I staked my spot, so one morning I arrived there at around 06:30 to find a couple of other people wandering around walking their dogs, another person with a camera who looked to be packing up already and a fisherman who was on his way home, apparently having caught four bass. Kynance Cove is a National Trust site that is absolutely stunning. From the car park it’s approached by walking down. steep path. I didn’t attempt that due to my choice of footwear. However, I wanted to get a high-level shot so that was fine by me. As usual the Big Stopper was brought out to play and it occurred to me that it might be worth trying a panoramic shot. The above image is made of three separate shots, stitched together in Photoshop. I wish I had thought about it a bit longer and taken a fourth as I feel the cottage on the right is too close to the edge of the image. Oh well. Once stitched together, the image had a bit of adjustment including the ever-reliable Lenswork LW Warm Tone treatment. A few days later I went back to the site but could hardly stand up thanks to Storm Ellen that was passing through, and any thoughts of setting up the tripod were instantly dismissed! Instead I retreated to the relative safety of my tent though there were times when I thought that would blow away too…

Canon EOS M6, 22 mm, ISO 100, 1/640 sec @ f/8

Over Christmas and New Year 2018/19 we spent time touring Thailand. We visted Bangkok before flying to Koh Tao for some diving, then getting the train from Surat Thani up to Chiang Mai before driving up to Chiang Rai, then returning to Bangkok for one last night. At the centre of the trip, wedged between time spent in Koh Tao and Chiang Mai was a five night stay on an island called Koh Yao Noi. On Christmas Eve we hired a couple of scooters and spent all day driving round. Stopping for lunch in a tiny fishing village I took a walk along a long pier where a haziness meant the view was was almost fog-like, whilst the sea was a similar shade of blue to the sky and everything appeared very flat. In the distance were some fishing boats whose relative proximity provided the only items of contrast against the background.

Canon EOD M6, 22 mm, ISO 800, 4 sec @ f/8

Late October 2019 saw a lot more rain than usual in the UK – so much so that on Tuesday 29th October saw a number of flood warnings (flooding is expected – immediate action required)  issued by the Environment Agency, including for the River Severn near to Upton-upon-Severn. Since this is now my local area I thought I would pop along to have a look, not having see the Severn in full flow before. Due to other commitments it was almost midnight by the time I was able to get there but needlesss to say the warning was justified and had previously built flood defences not been in place the town and my feet would have been very wet indeed.

Moored alongside the jetty is a large boat called Conway Castle. Normally most of this vessel is out of view, well below foot level. Tonight however the waterline was about two feet above foot level, held back by a wall that had just another inch or so before being breached. The flow rate was scarily fast too, with lots of boiling and swirling going on. Adding to the scary part was the fact that you could only see the immediate vicinity due to the lack of light, but you knew that out there in the dark was a river dooing its best to cause michief and mayhem.

Canon EOS M6, 22 mm, ISO 100, 165 sec @ f/16

We recently decided to do battle with midges and expensive alcohol and booked a lake-side cabin in southern Sweden at Deralycke, near Linneryd. The place was fantastic – utterly unspoilt and once we found another route to bypass a rather large tree that was blocking the road we had a splendid week of BBQs, fishing, reading and generally feeling vey isolated. Oh and I even managed to take a couple of photos. However, not having been able to take my proper tripod was a bit annoying but I did take my Manfrotto PIXI Mini tripod along with the M6 and Canon’s EF-M 22mm f/2 STM as well as my bag of filters. I ended up using a couple of chairs stacked on top of one another which wasn’t ideal due to squidgy, uneven surface and a fairly strong wind but it was better than nothing.

The fishing wasn’t much to speak of but I did at least manage to read five books over the week.